Ceres, that interesting dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, is confirmed to be just as icy as we had assumed. In fact, a new study of the world, led by Thomas Prettyman (Planetary Science Institute), was the subject of a press conference yesterday at the American...
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Circumbinary Planet Found in Microlensing Data
A circumbinary planet is one that orbits two stars, and to date we haven't found many of them. Word of a new detection comes from an event observed back in 2007 during a microlensing study called OGLE -- Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. OGLE is a Polish...
Philae Lander Found as Rosetta Nears End
We're only a month away from further excitement from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. As the mission approaches its final days, the Rosetta orbiter will conclude its activities with a controlled descent to the region called Ma'at, an area of open pits on the comet's...
Proxima Centauri Planet
A planet in the habitable zone around Proxima Centauri? The prospect dazzles the imagination, but then, I’ve been thinking about just that kind of planet for most of my life. Proxima Centauri is, after all, the closest star to our own, about 15000 AU from the primary...
The Blue Spectres of Abyssal Europa
Claudio Flores Martinez has just finished an MSc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany and is now enroute to a PhD in theoretical biology. He currently serves as a research assistant at the Developmental Biology Unit of EMBL and...
Evening Landscape with Exomoons
I often work out my thoughts on the topics we discuss here while taking long walks. I try to get in five miles a day but more often it’s about three. In any case, these long, reflective walks identify me as the neighborhood eccentric, an identity that is confirmed by...
KIC 8462852: Fading in the Kepler Data
Those of you who have been following the controversy over the dimming of KIC 8462852 (Tabby's Star) may remember an interesting note at the end of Bradley Schaefer's last post on Centauri Dreams. Schaefer (Louisiana State University) had gone through his reasoning for...
Antimatter Acquisition: Harvesting in Space
Talking about antimatter, as we've done in the past two posts, leads to the question of why the stuff is so hard to find. When we make it on Earth, we do so by smashing protons into targets inside particle accelerators of the kind found at the Fermi National...
Antimatter Propulsion: Birth of a Concept
I spent this past weekend poking into antimatter propulsion concepts and in particular looking back at how the idea developed. Two scientists -- Les Shepherd and Eugen Sänger -- immediately came to mind. I don't know when Sänger, an Austrian rocket designer who did...
Operations Throughout the Solar System
A reminder of how challenging it is to operate with solar power beyond the inner system is the fact that Juno carries 18,698 individual solar cells. Because it is five times further from the Sun than the Earth, the sunlight that reaches Juno is 25 times less powerful,...